Clams and Wine

 Today we walked from the hotel over to the other side of the harbor where we met with a local woman who was going to teach us the art of clam digging. I can't remember her name but she was the head of an all-woman cooperative. Well, they billed themselves all all-women but there are currently 240 women and 18 men in this cooperative. We went to her house where she had us put plastic bags over our socks and then put us in big rubber boots. Each of us received a rake and we were off to the harbor to search for clams. 

It was an extremely low tide, most of the official clam diggers were on the other side of the bay. They said that it takes them about a half hour to walk all the way over there but because of the unusual low tide, they were over there working in fresh pastures. The women work maybe four hours a day and their average age is 40-50 years old. The cooperative has been successful in getting benefits for the women such as retirement and standardized pay. We spent maybe a half hour dragging our rakes through the sand, turning us little tiny clams. There are strict regulations about the types and sizes of what you can harvest.

Many of the buildings had shells plastered on their walls

This is a Horreas - a structure that was used to store grain or dry fish. They are all over the place in Galicia. You could tell how rich a family was, by the number of legs the horreas had.

After our clam digging, we loaded up into our bus and headed to Lager de Pintos which is a winery currently run by 4^th generation winemaker Marta Castro-Pintos. Originally this was a farm but in the 1950's they started planting grapevines. Galicia is known for it's sandy soil and so so much granite that it is the perfect place to grow the native Albarino grape. Albarino has become one of my favorite wines – dry, lots of mineral ( granite, remember).

The vineyard - notice the granite supports

The manor house
A cool thing they had was a lawn mower that worked like a Roomba. 
It was just wandering all over the yard, cutting away.

Each tank had a different recipe or came from new vines or came from old vines.
Lots of tasting going on. 

We also tasted wine from more traditional barrels

Our winemaker Marta

After all the wine tasting we walked over to a small restaurant that was run by an Italian guy who had married a Galician girl.  The food was a cross between Galician and Neapolitan. The following pictures are of some of the different courses we had.